System design interview question
"Design an internal search assistant. Employees ask questions in natural language — 'what is our parental leave policy in Germany?' — and get an answer drawn from company documents, with citations. The documents live across wikis, drives, ticket systems, and chat. Fifty thousand employees, and permissions vary per document."
retrieval-augmented generation, where the model is the easy part and the retrieval and permissions are hard. The distinguishing content is: why retrieval quality dominates answer quality, the permission problem — a retrieved document the user is not allowed to see must never reach the model — and keeping an index fresh across many source systems.
On Practick another engineer interviews you live for 60 minutes on a question from this bank. They have the full interviewer guide beside the call: the answers to your clarifying questions, the numbers to hand out, a ladder of follow-ups and a scoring rubric. You get the model solution once the session settles. It is free: interview someone for an hour and you have earned your own.
Book a free mock interviewAll 132 system design interview questions
System design mock interviews · DSA interview questions · Free mock interview practice · Browse interviewers · Sign in